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Finally deployed the site I’ve been working on since May: http://www.baybackpack.com. Not gonna lie, it wasn’t a completely smooth process, but it’s done and I’m pretty proud of it. Zach Friedman is responsible for the design, I’m responsible for the code, and Guy Stephens led the project and kept us out of meetings.

We’re using ExpressionEngine for the CMS, and I’ve got to say I prefer it to WordPress for everything but blogging. Lots of support on the back end for setting up a good, robust data architecture, fairly user-friendly, and uses a very flexible templating engine that fits right into standard HTML. It actually looks a little like EJS or Handlebars. Much nicer to work with than some other CMS’s (cough cough WP cough cough) when you want to have full control over the front end.

Ironically, I also just rebooted this site as a WordPress site. This was largely a result of my wiping out my existing site while working with some automated GitHub deployment strategies. At this point I’m content to just have the site up and presentable while I rebuild the content, but eventually I’d like to use this as an opportunity to do some work with WordPress theme creation.

In the course of the reboot I upgraded from a hosted site to a VPS, and have been fiddling with things like private nameservers and local mail, which has been instructive. Also, nice to have an email address at my own domain for stuff like using Outlook (don’t judge), PGP, and just general nerd cred.